A dicing apparatus which divides a workpiece such as a wafer having semiconductor devices or electronic parts formed thereon into individual chips includes, at least, a dicing blade which is rotated at high speed by a spindle, a worktable which mounts the workpiece thereon, and moving shafts of X, Y, Z and θ for changing relative position of the worktable to the blade, and performs cutting process such as cutting and grooving on the workpiece by the operation of each of these moving shafts.
As the dicing blade used in such a dicing apparatus, various types of blades have been proposed (for instance, see Patent Literatures 1 and 2).
In Patent Literature 1, an electroformed blade is described in which diamond abrasive grains are stuck to an end face of a metallic base material (aluminum flange) with an electroforming method using an electroplating technique, and an alloy of soft metal such as nickel, copper or the like is used as a bonding material.
In Patent Literature 2, a diamond blade is described which is formed of a substrate formed of a plurality of diamond layers, by sequentially stacking different diamond layers that have different hardnesses from one another with a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method.